Starting async method as Thread or as Task

Question

I\'m new to C#s await/async and currently playing around a bit.

In my scenario I have a simple client-object which has a WebRequest

Answer 1

Since it is a fire and forget operation, you should start it using

SendAliveMessageAsync();

Note that await does not start a new Task. It is just syntactical sugar to wait for a Task to complete.
A new thread is started using Task.Run.

So inside SendAliveMessageAsync you should start a new Task:

private async Task SendAliveMessageAsync()
{
    const string keepAliveMessage = "{\"message\": {\"type\": \"keepalive\"}}";
    await Task.Run( () => {
        var seconds = 0;
        while (IsRunning)
        {
            if (seconds % 10 == 0)
            {
                await new StreamWriter(_webRequest.GetRequestStream()).WriteLineAsync(keepAliveMessage);
            }

            await Task.Delay(1000);
            seconds++;
        }
    });
}